The implementation and evaluation of the use of CORBA in an engineering design application

Many computer applications today require some form of distributed computing to allow different software components to communicate. Several different commercial products now exist based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) of the Object Management Group. The use of such tools, however, often requires the modification of existing systems, rather than the development of new applications. The objective of this research has been to integrate the use of a CORBA tool into an existing engineering design application for the purpose of (1) evaluating the amount of re-engineering that is involved to effectively integrate distributed object computing into an existing application, and (2) evaluating the use and performance of distributed object computing in an engineering domain, which often requires the transfer of large amounts of information. The results of this work demonstrate that CORBA technology can be easily integrated into existing applications. The ease of the integration as well as the efficiency of the resulting system, however, depends upon the degree of modification that developers are willing to consider in the re-engineering process. The most transparent approach to the use of CORBA requires less modification and generally produces less efficient performance. The less transparent approach to the use of CORBA can potentially require significant system modification but produce greater performance gains. This work outlines issues that must be considered for the partitioning of functionality between the client and the server, development of an IDL interface, development of client and server-side wrappers, and support for concurrent, multi-user access. In addition, this work also provides performance and implementation comparisons of different techniques for the use of wrappers and for the transfer of large data files between the client and the server. Performance comparisons for the incorporation of concurrent access are also presented. Copyright 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.